After touring billions of miles for seven years to contact an asteroid and convey a sample house, NASA’s Osiris-REx mission has lastly despatched its valuable contents hurtling towards Earth’s ambiance.
The spacecraft efficiently launched a sample canister holding a few cupful asteroid rock on because it handed inside 63,000 miles of the planet’s floor, officers announced Sunday morning.
In the canister needs to be roughly a espresso mug’s price of rock and different materials collected from the asteroid Bennu, which on the time was greater than 200 million miles away.
Recovery groups take part in discipline rehearsals in preparation for the retrieval of the sample return capsule from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission in August 2023 in Utah.
Keegan Barber /NASA
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Keegan Barber /NASA
Recovery groups take part in discipline rehearsals in preparation for the retrieval of the sample return capsule from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission in August 2023 in Utah.
Keegan Barber /NASA
That single serving of area rock will mark the most important haul of extraterrestrial materials introduced back by any nation on Earth for the reason that Apollo astronauts carried items of the moon house, and the fruits of NASA’s first try to convey samples of an asteroid back to Earth.
Asteroids symbolize the primordial constructing materials from our early Solar System, untainted by planetary processes or by the presence of residing issues. As such, they may provide scientists a window into the form of chemistry that would have led to life on Earth.
But for that to occur, that canister will now have to make the ultimate leg of its journey alone. To achieve this, it should have to bear temperatures hotter than lava and decelerate from a screaming 36 instances the velocity of sound earlier than touchdown in Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert.
Officials say they count on the capsule to land in Utah shortly earlier than 11 a.m. After retrieving it, group members will fly the canister to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, which homes the repository for outer area samples like moon rocks. On Tuesday, if all goes properly, they’re going to open the canister inside a particular lab.
After that, the plan is to retailer a part of the sample in order that future generations of scientists may also research these samples with extra superior instruments — simply as scientists at the moment are nonetheless learning moon rocks that Apollo astronauts introduced back so many many years in the past.